Gore Vidal - Messiah

Not until Cave was nearly finished did those first words of his, spoken so easily, so quietly, begin to come back to me as he repeated them in his coda. His voice increasing a little in volume, yet still not hurrying, not forcing, not breaking the mood which his first glance had created and which voice and eyes together maintained without once letting go. The burden of his words was, as always, the same. Yet this time it seemed more awesome, more final, undeniable… in short, the truth. Though I'd always accepted his first premise, I had never been much impressed by the ways he found of stating it, even though I always responded to his particular power. This night, before the camera and in the sight of millions, he perfected his singular art of communication and the world was his.

When he finished, Clarissa and I sat for a moment in complete silence, the chirping of a commercial the only sound in the room. At last she said: "The brandy is over there on the console. Get me some." Then she switched off the screen from her chair and the lights of the room brightened again.

"I feel dragged through a wringer," she said after her first mouthful of brandy.

"I had no idea it would work so well, like this, on television." I felt strangely empty, let down. There was hardly any doubt now of Cave's effectiveness yet I felt joyless and depleted, as though part of my life had gone, leaving an ache.

"What a time we're going to have." Clarissa was beginning to recover. "I'll bet there are a million letters by morning and Paul will be doing a jig."

"I hope this is the right thing, Clarissa. It would be terrible if it weren't."

"Of course it's right… whatever that means: if it works it's right… perfectly simple. Such conceptions are all a matter of fashion anyway. One year women expose only their ankle; the next year their derrière . What's right one year is wrong the next. If Cave captures the popular imagination, he'll be right until someone better comes along."

"A little cynical." But Clarissa was only repeating my own usual line. I was, or had been until that night on the Washington farm, a contented relativist. Cave, however, had jolted me into new ways and I was bewildered by the change, by the prospect ahead.

That evening was a time of triumph, at least for Cave's companions. They arrived noisily. Paul seemed drunk, manically exhilirated, while Iris glowed in a formal gown of green shot with gold. Two men accompanied them, one a doctor whose name I didn't catch at first and the other a man from the television network who looked wonderfully sleek and pleased and kept patting Cave on the arm every now and then, as if to assure himself he'd not vanished in smoke and fire. Cave, still dressed in his dark suit, was mute. He sat answering questions and replying to compliments with grave nods of his head. He sat in a high brocaded chair beside the fire and drank tea which Clarissa, knowing his habits, had ordered in advance for him.

After our first burst of greetings at the door I did not speak to Cave again and soon the others left him alone and talked around him, about him yet through him, as though he had become invisible… which seemed the case when he was not speaking, when those extraordinary eyes were veiled or cast down, as they were now, moodily studying the teacup, the pattern in the Aubusson rug at his feet.

I crossed the room to where Iris sat on the wide couch. The doctor, in the chair close to her, snuffled brandy and said, as I joined them: "Your little book, sir, is written in a complete ignorance of Jung and all those who have come after him."

This was sudden but I answered, as graciously as possible, that I had not intended a treatise on psychoanalysis. "Not the point, sir, if you'll excuse me… I am a psychiatrist, a friend of Mr Himmell's" (so this was the analyst to whom Paul so often referred) "and I think it impossible for anyone today to write about the big things without a complete understanding of post-Jungian development…"

Iris interrupted as politely as possible. "Doctor Stokharin is a zealot, Gene. You must listen to him but, first, did you see John tonight?"

"I did, here with Clarissa: he was remarkable, even more so than in person."

"It is the isolation," said Stokharin, nodding. Dandruff fell lightly like dry snow from his thick brows to his dark blue lapels. "The camera separates him from everyone else. He is projected like a dream into…"

"He was so afraid at first," said Iris, glancing across the room at the silent Cave who sat, very small and still in the brocaded chair, the teacup still balanced on one knee. "I've never seen him disturbed by anything before. They tried to get him to do a rehearsal but he refused. He can't do rehearsals… only the actual thing."

"Fear is natural when…" but Stokharin was in the presence of a master drawing-room tactician: Iris was, I saw at that moment, a born hostess. For all her ease and simplicity she was ruthlessly concerned with keeping order, establishing a rightness of tone which Doctor Stokharin, in his professional madness, would have completely undone, reducing the drawing room to a seminar in mental therapy, receiving public confessions judiciously, and generalizing to a captive audience. I admired Iris's firmness, her devotion to the civilized.

"At first we hardly knew what to do." Iris's voice rose serenely over the East European rumblings of the doctor. "He'd always made such a point of the audience. He needed actual people to excite him. Paul wanted to fill the studio with a friendly audience but John said no. He'd try it without. When the talk began there were only a half dozen of us there: Paul, myself, and the technicians. No one else."

"How did he manage?"

"It was the camera. He said when he walked out there he had no idea if anything would happen or not, if he could speak. Paul was nearly out of his mind with terror; we all were. Then John saw the lens of the camera. He said looking into it gave him a sudden shock, like a current of electricity passing through him, for there, in front of him, was the eye of the world and the microphone above his head was the ear into which at last he could speak. When he finished, he was transfigured. I've never seen him so excited. He couldn't recall what he had said but the elation remained until…"

"Until he got here."

"Well, nearly." Iris smiled. "He's been under a terrible strain these last two weeks."

"It'll be nothing like the traumatizing shocks in store for him during the next few days," said Stokharin, rubbing the bole of a rich dark pipe against his nose to bring out its luster (the pipe's luster, for the nose, straight, thick, proud, already shone like a gross baroque pearl). "Mark my words, everyone will be eager to see this phenomenon. When Paul first told me about him, I said, ah, my friend, you have found that father image for which you've searched since your own father was run over by a bus in your ninth (the crucial) year. Poor Paul, I said, you will be doomed to disappointment. The wish for the father is the sign of your immaturity. For a time you find him here, there… in analysis you transfer to me. Now you meet a spellbinder and you turn to him, but it will not last. Exactly like that I talked to him. Believe me, I hold back nothing. Then I met this Cave. I watched him. Ah, what an analyst he would have made! What a manner, what power of communication: a natural healer. If only we could train him. Miss Mortimer, to you I appeal. Get him to study. The best people, the post-Jungians are all here in New York. They will train him. He would become only a lay analyst but, even so, what miracles he could perform, what therapy! We must not waste this native genius."

"I'm afraid, Doctor, that he's going to be too busy wasting himself to study your… procedures," Iris smiled, engagingly, dislike apparent in her radiant eyes. Stokharin, however, was not sensitive to hostility… no doubt attributing such emotions to some sad deficiency in the other's adjustment. Iris turned to me. "Will you be in the city the whole time?"